Datsyuk and Zetterberg are, right now, about as good as they're going to be from here on out. Alfredsson is here and he's awesome and ludicrously motivated. Howard is in fine form.

Ericsson is good enough that he can play top-pairing minutes or drop down to the second pairing and be really, really good - so, point being, it's not like adding a high-end defenseman would give us only two really good defensemen (which, I admit, probably wouldn't be worth it). It'd give us three studs plus DeKeyser, and that's a potentially Cup-winning top four, unlike what we have now (yeah, we're gonna win it all with Smith-Quincey getting pretty big minutes. Excuse me while I barf.)

Or, if we wanna go for a scoring forward - go for it, Ken! We need all the scoring help we can get! Do it!

This team is nowhere good enough to be a legitimate Cup contender. I'm starting to feel bad for Alfie. Do you see us beating the Pens in a best-of-seven? Boston? I think even the Leafs would thump us, and, ick, that's a new and extremely unpleasant notion. Or, let's say we come out of the East. Do we beat the 'hawks or Sharks or even the Avs? OK, maybe the Avs. But it'd probably be close, and Mule would have to be the real Mule, which we can't really count on.

"Well, two things, Robert."

Go ahead.

"First, we took the Blackhawks to seven games last season."

I think we got a bit...well, I don't want to say lucky. I'll put it this way: I don't see us doing that again. We were just obscenely incredible for that three-game stretch, and the 'hawks were not themselves during that time. They got their crap together, Brendan Smith existed, and we ended that series on an incredibly terrible, madly disappointing, searingly sour note.

"OK, fair enough. But, the second thing is, we're in the middle of a big transition phase; we should be satisfied with just making the playoffs."

Booooooo!!!

We're the Red Wings. It's Cup or bust every season, no excuses. And Daniel Alfredsson, who some believe is God Himself, chose the Wings over the Bruins for His final push. So, win the Cup or go to Hell. (No pressure.)

/weekly rant

Rant more often than weekly.
And ask yourself questions in the 3rd person on the daily.
That made me smile.

So...it begs to ask the question: How, at this current juncture of the season, can a team with such an inept ability to put the "biscuit in the basket" still have both such impressive record and standing in their newly-minted Conference home?

"If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!" - Kierkegaard

Our D sucks. It wasn't just our forwards that teams needed to fear. When our d was good, it was near tops in the league in goals scored. We never replaced the 35+ goals lost from raf, lids and company.